Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14: Early Medieval Mortuary Practices

By Sarah Semple and Howard Williams

Volume 14 of the Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History series is dedicated to the archaeology of early medieval death, burial and commemoration. Incorporating studies focusing upon Anglo-Saxon England as well as research encompassing western Britain, Continental Europe and Scandinavia, this volume originated as the proceedings of a two-day conference held at the University of Exeter in February 2004. It comprises of an Introduction that outlines the key debates and new approaches in early medieval mortuary archaeology followed by eighteen innovative research papers offering new interpretations of the material culture, monuments and landscape context of early medieval mortuary practices. Papers contribute to a variety of ongoing debates including the study of ethnicity, religion, ideology and social memory from burial evidence. The volume also contains two cemetery reports of early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries from Cambridgeshire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 10, 2007
• ISBN: 9781782975083

Book preview

Introduction: Themes in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Death and Burial

Howard Williams

Introduction

The early medieval period (c. 400–1100 AD) has been studied by archaeologists through many forms of material evidence: from settlements to sculpture, from pottery to pollen grains. Yet scholars of the period continue to be fascinated and challenged by the rich and complex data from early medieval graves and cemeteries. The aim of this volume is to explore new perspectives applied to this evidence. This introduction aims to set the scene by addressing why graves and cemeteries are such an important archaeological resource for the period. To do this, the chapter considers how studies of early medieval mortuary practices have developed, what themes and ideas are presented by researchers in this volume, and where studies of early medieval graves might develop in the future. Because other papers in this volume address Continental and Scandinavian evidence, this paper will focus its attention on the archaeology of early medieval Britain, especially the furnished burial rites of southern and eastern England from the fifth to seventh centuries AD.

Why Graves?

There are many explanations for the persistent interest in early medieval burials by archaeologists. Certainly the early medieval grave provides a secure and sealed deposit that can contain preserved human remains, artefacts and structures in contextual association with each other. The burial evidence can therefore allow archaeologists to answer innumerable questions about the societies that created them and their changing attitudes towards death and the dead.

There are other reasons for this interest in the early medieval dead. They are ‘attractive’ as a rare instance where we can directly access early medieval lives. The information their bones provide gives us the perception of intimacy with the past and the stories the dead ‘speak’ to us and bring the past to life. They provide a materiality, corporeality and, somewhat ironically, they give vitality to the early Middle Ages in a way that cannot be done through either other material remains or through the heavily stylised texts that survive from the period.¹, ²

This attraction is made stronger through the perception of many that early medieval people are incontrovertibly the ancestors of the modern inhabitants of the British Isles, and that the early Middle Ages was the time when many of the beliefs, practices and traditions that persisted into recent centuries were originated or consolidated, whether from mainly indigenous or intrusive sources.³

Through graves we directly come ‘face-to-face’ with death and the dead. Very few individuals in early twenty-first-century British society have the misfortune to regularly experience death first-hand. Hospitals and undertakers serve to render the corporeality of death distant and manageable and yet death is an obsession of our media. In this environment, ancient graves have an allure unlike any other archaeological data. Hence one might evoke our evolving grisly obsession of British culture with death and commemoration since the Victorian period as a reason for the interest in the archaeology of graves and cemeteries.

Artefacts from burial contexts have an appeal beyond their archaeological value in popular culture. In our society, the material world is cherished and fetishistic obsessions with ancient and precious things abound, manifest (for example) in the increasing popularity of an international trade in illicit antiquities. Building on a long tradition of regarding early medieval artefacts as collector’s items; weapons and dress accessories appeal as much as bones to the modern mind. This is especially the case in instances where the volume and quality of grave goods deserve the description of ‘treasure’; as with the wealthy, chamber grave recently discovered at Prittlewell in Essex or the contents of St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral.⁴

The appeal of mortuary evidence is enhanced by cases where the act of discovering such graves also becomes a story in itself, in which the archaeologist can be portrayed as the pioneer and adventurer. In terms of the accounts of the treasure from mound 1 at Sutton Hoo we can recognise attempts to create the home-grown equivalent to Howard Carter’s report on the discoveries in the Valley of the Kings.⁵

Given that the early medieval period as a whole can be characterised as a time of rapid socio-economic, political and religious change and with fragmentary and problematic texts: burials and cemeteries have taken on a special importance by serving to illustrate early medieval history. Graves and other mortuary remains are the intentional outcomes of ritual performances by groups and communities. They are therefore material expressions of public acts and procedures when dealing with the dead. Graves inform us about the traditions, characteristics, structures and diversities of the communities and societies that created them. More specifically they reveal changing early medieval responses to death, dying and the deceased.⁶ In turn, the study of these mortuary practices from early medieval Britain can illuminate key themes and debates in the interpretation of burial evidence relevant to all periods and all parts of the globe.

Set against the background of this ongoing research tradition, this volume is about new perspectives on early medieval death and burial, gleaned from new data, methods and theories. To situate the work presented here, let us begin by reviewing the history and development of research into early medieval mortuary practices.

Discoveries, Methods and Theories in Early Medieval Mortuary Archaeology

Discoveries

The roots of early medieval burial archaeology can be found before the advent of archaeology as a discipline: as long ago as the early medieval period itself, both texts and material evidence attest to the occasional practice of exhuming and interpreting the dead. The beginnings of the antiquarian study of early medieval graves are, however, usually charted back to the seventeenth century, with the antiquary Thomas Browne.⁷ While Browne (and subsequent pioneers like the barrow-digger Bryan Faussett) attributed the graves they uncovered to the Roman period, James Douglas is often regarded as the first excavator to attribute them correctly to the early medieval period.⁸

During the nineteenth century, cemeteries, burial mounds, tombs and funerary sculpture were investigated and reported in national and local journals and in books. The legacy of the nineteenth century has been a vast data-base of funerary evidence ascribed to the early Middle Ages.⁹ While the end of the nineteenth century saw a lull of interest in early medieval graves, the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in early medieval burials and new explorations leading to the discovery of the ‘princely’ cemetery at Sutton Hoo beginning with excavations in 1938 and 1939.¹⁰

After World War II, excavations continued and were increasingly recorded by modern contextual standards for both early Anglo-Saxon (or pagan period) and middle Anglo-Saxon (including ‘final-phase’) cemeteries.¹¹ Meanwhile later Anglo-Saxon burials were increasingly recovered, recognised and recorded¹² as were burials from other parts of western and northern Britain, from Cornwall to Orkney.¹³ Today’s scholars have therefore inherited a long tradition of discovering, excavating and interpreting early medieval graves.

Methods and Techniques

In combination with this increasing data-set available for study; methods and techniques for the archaeological investigation of graves have developed too. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century methodologies consisted of either barrow-digging or the exploration of cemeteries following upon accidental discoveries.¹⁴ In both instances, the focus tended to be placed on objects, with only a small selection of scholars exploring the mortuary context itself. The study of human remains by trained medical practitioners focused on the misguided study of craniology to discern the race, class and sex of the deceased.¹⁵

It was only in the 1930s and 1940s that methods of excavation and recording show a demonstrable improvement over the best of the previous century. Early excavations with a detailed record of grave-contexts include the Holywell Row and Burwell cemeteries in Suffolk¹⁶ although the illustration and contextual detail was lacking for most individual burials. The wealth and complexity of the rich assemblage from the chamber within the mound 1 ship burial at Sutton Hoo provided the motivation for more careful recording of contextual information necessary to make detailed inferences.¹⁷ Yet this was very much the exception rather than the rule in the era before the Second World War. In the post-war era, modern scientific archaeology has seen the emergence of earthwork-survey, aerial photography, and more recently, field-walking techniques and geophysical survey as techniques used in the investigation of early medieval cemeteries and their contexts. Meanwhile the advent of metal-detecting as a hobby has provided both new discoveries and new threats to early medieval graves. The recording of graves in-plan with the contextual recording of objects and human remains is now all but universal, yet is only commonplace in excavation reports where grave-goods are recovered.¹⁸ Most recently, we have seen the adoption of GIS in the recording of graves as at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire and the more detailed recording of late fifth and sixth-century graves with multiple plans and sections as at Snape, Suffolk¹⁹

With the increasing wealth of mortuary evidence, archaeologists have developed refined typologies and chronologies too. For find-less graves, the adoption of AMS radiocarbon dating has been increasingly employed. ²⁰ The raft of scientific methods applicable to early medieval graves has developed tremendously in recent years, from techniques in studying human remains including ageing, sexing, assessing stature, health and disease as well as the study of the ritual technology of cremation.²¹ The ability to extract ancient DNA was heralded with enthusiasm but has yet to produce detailed results for either studying population or gender.²² More positively, studies of bone chemistry have opened up exciting possibilities in the investigation of early medieval migration and diet.²³

Yet for all this barrage of new methods and techniques, the investigation and excavation of early medieval graves remains something of an ‘art’. The discipline continues to rest on the interpretations of human agents during the often complex process of discovering, excavating, recording, analysing and publishing early medieval graves. These choices are not simply a mechanical process of extracting ‘facts’ from the soil, but the engagement of theories, questions and ideas with the observed material remains.

Interpreting Early Medieval Graves

From its Victorian origins, a racial and religious paradigm has dominated the study of early medieval graves; a desire to identify the history and character of barbarian races, their pagan religious beliefs, and their conversion to Christianity. This was achieved through a series of dichotomies; between pagan Germanic and Christian Celts, between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. These themes have permeated twentieth-century scholarship as well, but with a more detailed and historical focus upon charting invasion, settlement and conversion. For instance, the influence of culture-history can be recognised in the analyses of brooches and pottery from graves as a means of writing the (pre-) history of the Anglo-Saxons. These approaches might also be regarded as extensions of an ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and more broadly across the British Isles, the interaction of imperialism, colonialism and nationalism in the study of early medieval burial evidence.²⁴

These culture-histories continue to be popular in some quarters to the present day, but in the post-war era they were augmented by economic and territorial perspectives. ²⁵ Subsequently from the 1970s, some archaeologists adopted the theoretical standpoints of North American and British prehistorians in pursuing an anti-historical, social archaeology.²⁶ As well as looking for vertical differentiation between rank and status groups, some studies also looked at horizontal differentiation including gender, age, kinship, households and regionality. The pervasiveness of this approach can be recognised in the fact that select cemetery reports of the 1980s and 1990s incorporated their own social analysis; attempting to see patterns in mortuary data as a reflection of the social organisation (or its idealised representation as social structure) of the living society.²⁷

The emergence of the post-processual critiques of the New Archaeology focused on the need to recognise the importance of meaning, power, ideology and context in the investigation of past societies. Moreover, these perspectives brought with them a critique of attempts to ‘read’ social organisation directly and simplistically in the variability of early medieval burial rites. The search for meaning inherent within both artefacts and the burial context involved adopting linguistic, textual, and even poetic analogies for the study of early medieval graves. These approaches emphasised the potential for mortuary ritual to represent, but also to transform, social and political relations.²⁸ Meanwhile, other scholars focused their attention on the political context of the active and symbolic messages of mortuary practices.²⁹ Despite these developments, many studies have simply ignored or paid lip-service to these theoretical developments. Numerous analyses continue to be interpreted in traditional cultural and religious terms in many popular studies as well as more detailed scholarly analyses. For some, burial archaeology remains a sub-set of the investigation of early medieval culture-history, religion and church archaeology without recognising or addressing the range of recent debates about the meaningful and discursive nature of mortuary practices.³⁰

Debating Early Medieval Mortuary Archaeology

Built upon the rich data of recent excavations, the papers presented here, contain elements of culture-historic, social, symbolic and ideological perspectives combined with the presentation of new perspectives. The volume is arranged in themes rather than by period or region to emphasise the theories explored.

Debating Death and Identity

As noted above, the study of the relationship between burial and identity (whether racial, religious, cultural or social) has been a pervasive theme in early medieval mortuary archaeology since Victorian times. In the first section, five papers discuss different types of relationships between identity and the disposal of the dead in the early Middle Ages.

The contribution by Heinrich Härke addresses directly the thorny topic (and perhaps the most enduring in early medieval burial studies) of ethnicity. He presents a perspective that both rejects a traditional interpretation of early medieval ethnicity as based on racial and tribal origins but equally challenges recent studies that dismiss the usage of ethnicity entirely. Susanne Hakenbeck’s paper espouses a local, contextual approach to the construction of identities in early medieval Europe. She charts the use and abuse of ethnicity in past studies of early medieval Bavaria, and considers how instead archaeologists can consider ethnicity as one element of the ‘nested identities’ communicated through the material culture of early medieval cemeteries. A further form of identity is considered by Rik Hoggett who addresses the link between burial and religious identity. Focusing on East Anglia, Hoggett questions the tendency of recent studies to reject religious explanations and suggests that religious conversion is reflected in changing mortuary traditions. Zoë Devlin’s paper augments these discussions by evaluating how social memories were produced and reproduced through early medieval funerals and the material culture used therein. She provides a valuable review of historical and anthropological approaches to social memory and explores the ways in which mortuary practices employed portable objects with particular histories in mediating the retrospective commemoration of identities of the deceased in life, but also prospectively constructing new identities for the dead. The memories constructed through the use of artefacts in mortuary practices were therefore not concerned with directly reflecting static identities but constructing links between past, present and future identities. To put current debates in British and Continental burial archaeology in context, Martin Rundkvist provides an overview of recent Scandinavian first millennium AD mortuary studies, exploring the similarities and differences from the British pattern outlined above.

Burial Rites and Artefacts

The themes of identity and social memory are pursued further in the study of grave goods and burial contexts in six papers. Rebecca Gowland focuses on a critique of traditional concepts of ethnicity, suggesting that we can go ‘beyond ethnicity’ through a new systematic osteological investigation of entire samples of human remains from cemetery excavations. Additionally, she notes similarities in the signalling of aged and gendered social identities in the burial rites of both late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries of southern England that have tended to be ignored in period-specific studies. Chris Fern addresses the role of animal sacrifice in early medieval funerals; comparing and contrasting the ritual killing and disposal of horses from the inhumation and cremation rites of early Anglo-Saxon England and their different Continental influences. Meanwhile, Sue Harrington’s paper looks at the evidence from east Kent to illustrate the often-overlooked role of textiles in mortuary practices. Harrington argues that the potential of the careful conservation and analysis of textiles is a richer understanding of the provision of materials in graves. The paper by this author looks at an overlooked category of grave goods, namely the toilet implements of early Anglo-Saxon cremation and inhumation burials. The evidence shows that there was a special significance attributed to toilet implements in post-cremation rites serving to commemorate a new identity for the dead.

The last two papers in this section by Jo Buckberry and Annia Cherryson demonstrate the vast untapped potential of the social analysis of the burial rites of later Anglo-Saxon England. Buckberry combines data from published osteological reports and from her own analyses of the bones from a sample of later Anglo-Saxon graves from Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. She identifies diversity in the spatial organisation, grave forms and structures employed to articulate the status of the deceased. Cherryson also considers middle and late Anglo-Saxon burial rites, but instead of focusing on the contents of graves, she addresses the increasing disturbance of earlier graves during the period by comparing field cemeteries with those found associated with churches. In combination, the six papers illustrate how contextual analyses of burial data are applicable from the late Roman period through to the eleventh century.

Mortuary Practices: Monuments and Landscape

Six papers encapsulate the burgeoning interest in early medieval mortuary monuments and landscapes. A consideration of patterns in burial location in the early medieval landscape of Kent is pursued by Stuart Brookes with the aid of Geographical Information Systems. His study integrates maps, place-names, later medieval historical evidence and the distribution of known cemeteries and settlements to suggest that routes provided a central influence on the positioning and experience of cemeteries by the early medieval population. Meanwhile, Nick Stoodley addresses the connections between authority, territoriality, burial and landscape to consider the phenomenon of cemetery-shift in the seventh century. He develops this through the case study of excavations at two neighbouring cemeteries at Portway Andover. Dawn Hadley explores the often misunderstood issue of burial location from the seventh up to the eleventh centuries AD. She suggests that shifts in burial location were the norm rather than a unique phenomenon of the seventh century.

The next three papers move the focus away from Anglo-Saxon England. The Viking-period re-use of earlier sites and the topographical situation of furnished Viking-period graves is explored by Stephen Harrison. He shows how Scandinavian-style furnished burials may have consciously employed topography and the appropriation of existing native sites to make socio-political statements of authority and identity. Eva Thäte’s paper looks at Viking-period Scandinavia. She considers the issue of monument reuse but in this paper the focus is on the selective re-use of abandoned house-sites for burial and monument-building. Finally David Petts looks at mythical geographies of burial as portrayed in the literature of early medieval Wales. Rather than seeing the written sources as portraying objectively where and how the elites were buried in the eighth to eleventh centuries AD, Petts argues that both the texts and the mortuary material culture and sculpture of the age were implicated in socio-political discourses.

The Excavation Reports

In addition to the research papers, this volume includes two excavation reports that serve to illuminate the rich new data being produced through ongoing field-based investigation both within the realm of research excavations and rescue-led projects.

Directions in Early Medieval Mortuary Archaeology

What is the future for early medieval mortuary archaeology? It is clear that many of the papers in this volume point research in new directions. Yet it would be amiss for an introduction to this volume that advocates the pursuit of new perspectives not to highlight other areas for potential research. These consist of new directions in mortuary theory, the exploration of the context of mortuary practices in past societies, as well as the study of the history of, popular culture of, and ethical considerations surrounding, early medieval mortuary archaeology.

Mortuary Theory

The last decade of early medieval mortuary archaeology in Britain has seen a series of inter-related new theoretical themes. They have a common focus on the performative and embodied qualities of mortuary practices; the strategic and contextual uses of the arena of death by the living as they experience, engage with, an exploit, mortuary practices. These perspectives promise to situate the interpretation of early medieval death and burial within wider debates in archaeology as well as themes in cognate disciplines such as history, sociology and anthropology.³¹

The issue of mortuary symbolism is by no means done and dusted. Mortuary symbolism–or perhaps more broadly, mortuary significances–have many forms, and therefore more careful considerations of the types of signifier and the range of signified concepts of a particular symbol need to be broadened. Iconic, symbolic and metaphorical messages can be manifest in the material culture deployed in funerals, from portable artefacts to monuments.³² This is especially true if we consider that, at least some, objects and materials deployed in burials had complex ‘biographies’ prior to their disposal with the dead; histories that may have informed their role in the funeral.³³ In theorising this, the tendency has been to consider symbolism as largely ‘social’ in character, pertaining to the identity of the dead person or statements made by mourners about their aspirations and identities. Symbolism liked to eschatology and cosmology requires further attention.³⁴

The theme of agency has been mainly explored in studies of prehistoric mortuary ritual although Lucy has incorporated these perspectives in her ‘contextual’ approach to early medieval cemeteries.³⁵ Meanwhile, this author has developed a view of early medieval cremation rites that considers both the agency of the living and the dead. The potential for considering objects, cadavers, graves and monuments raised, as having an ‘agency’ to affect and direct social structures and ideals has yet to be fully explored.³⁶

As discussed by Devlin, the relationship between mortuary practices and social memory is central to considering the impact or ‘agency’ of the rituals surrounding death. Yet the range of media and technologies involved in selective remembering and forgetting during mortuary rituals is only beginning to be explored in early medieval archaeology. Of equal concern is what is remembered; whether memories are retrospective or prospective, the media employed in remembering and forgetting (including texts, images, monuments and portable artefacts) and the ways in which different mortuary practices served as divergent and contrasting strategies of commemoration. There is considerable potential in thinking of early medieval mortuary practices as evolving and varying ‘technologies of remembrance’ in which material culture and the spatial and temporal structuring of the funeral, are carefully employed together with the corpse in order to create memorable experiences and influence the perception of the past and the future through the present.³⁷

In this way we can regard mortuary practices as less concerned with the representation of static identities. Through the mortuary process, the identities of both the living and the dead are transformed, not simply composed. Drawing upon anthropological theories of identity, we can consider how early medieval concepts of the person might incorporate ‘individual’ elements. By this it is meant that qualities of the person are shared between, and exchanged between people, rather than residing in individuals. Anthropological research shows how personhood can operate at a number of scales: personal, social, cosmological and ontological. Therefore, (for example), when archaeologists consider the relationship with animals, objects and monuments in mortuary practices, they are more than substances that ‘refer to’ or ‘represent’ individuals. Instead, the material world of death can be considered as contributing towards and even distributing concepts of the person, as considered by Chris Fowler and Jo Brück for later prehistoric Britain.³⁸

Without doubt mortuary practices are recognised by many commentators to be more than concerned with the identities of the dead and the living, they are also contexts for mourning. Taking the lead from Sarah Tarlow’s discussions of emotion and mortuary practices in post-medieval archaeology, there is potential for considering the range of emotional responses encapsulated within bereavement and mourning practices that may have been stylised and mediated through early medieval material culture associated with the dead.³⁹

In combination these themes combine to create something of a check-list of potential areas for future research. Without a meaningful debate over their validity, early medieval mortuary archaeology will not progress into new arenas of research.

Early Medieval Mortuary Archaeology in Context

In addition to these specific theories, there is also the question of how early medieval mortuary archaeology fits into the wider study of the early Middle Ages. There are four areas that require mention here, first the broader stories, narratives or ‘meta-narratives’ that early medieval graves are slotted into, and serve to enhance. Traditionally, these have been straightforwardly the questions of successive migrations and colonisations by incoming groups, the diffusion of ideas and beliefs, and the evolution of societies into kingdoms.⁴⁰ Yet there are other narratives that mortuary archaeology can address. Indeed, it is perhaps a sign of maturity of the subject that a wide range of interpretive frameworks and ‘histories’ can be written from early medieval graves, and wider contexts can be explored for the significance of mortuary practices of early medieval people.

A clear example of an ‘alternative’ narrative into which early medieval graves can be discussed is the history of gender relations.⁴¹ Another is the history of settlement and landscape: a story that has tended to be written from settlement evidence rather than burials.⁴² To provide one final example, early medieval graves can contribute to wider debates over the social construction of death. Sociologists, anthropologists, historians and psychologists could easily be looking to archaeology for answers and contexts for their perspectives of dying, death and the dead rather than the other way around. This can only begin, however, if archaeologists start to employ their theories, methods and data to address wider inter-disciplinary debates over death across cultures.⁴³

The second issue relates to the use of analogy in the interpretation of early medieval graves. While the use of place-name and textual evidence has become commonplace in studies of early medieval burials,⁴⁴ the use of ethnographies, anthropological and sociological theories have long been entertained in early medieval burial studies, and still there remains a lack of coherent discussions on the integration and assessment of these analogies.⁴⁵ Similarly, the use of experimental archaeology in the study of early medieval mortuary practices has untapped potential. ⁴⁶

A third issue concerns the critical integration of mortuary theory into the excavation of early medieval graves. Until relatively recently, there has been a tendency for excavation strategies and methods to be situated as static processes that sit outside the research questions being asked. This has been challenged by research-led projects that have served to develop methods and techniques as an integral part of the fieldwork strategy.⁴⁷ Yet in the context of field archaeology, a lack of consideration for mortuary theory might render certain questions unanswerable since the data is not being adequately recorded or even recognised. In short, there is a debate to be held over the extent to which theory, method and data can be separated, and how they relate to each other during cemetery excavations.

A final theme worthy of further consideration is the history of the subject itself. There have been numerous broad summaries on the history of the study of early medieval graves, as with the review above.⁴⁸ However, the detailed and contextual analysis of the intellectual and socio-political influences upon their study has yet to be achieved, nor indeed, has it been regarded as a serious avenue of archaeological research. A major landmark in developing such an approach would be more detailed explorations of specific scholars and periods like that conducted recently for Merovingian mortuary archaeology. It remains to be seen if comparable studies are developed to address early medieval Britain.⁴⁹

The Public Archaeology of Early Medieval Graves

So far we have addressed themes related to the interpretation of burials themselves, but there are also challenges to be faced in considering how these graves are used in the presentation and education of the public. From the ‘theatre’ of cemetery excavation where the public can sometimes view the work of the archaeologists, through to the images and accounts of graves in journals and books, early medieval mortuary remains portray the early Middle Ages to the public in many ways. Graves are used in the promotion of early medieval archaeology.⁵⁰

Museums provide one such environment in which early medieval dead are displayed. This is because they contain artefacts from graves and frequently use information provided by human remains to reconstruct the experience of living in the ‘Dark Ages’.⁵¹ Equally, museums contain reconstructions of graves themselves, as at Sutton Hoo where the visitor can not only walk around the burial mounds, but the Visitor Centre contains a reconstruction of the chamber within the mound 1 ship-burial.⁵²

Similarly, the recently renovated Corinium museum in Cirencester, Gloucestershire has an Anglo-Saxon gallery that is almost exclusively dedicated to the display of finds and contexts uncovered from the sixth and seventh-century cemetery at Lechlade.⁵³ The centre-piece is a display of a wealthy female burial of the sixth century AD employing the careful reconstruction of her burial posture, appearance (based on forensic reconstruction), costume, grave-goods and structures. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a weapon burial is also portrayed. Here, the public is treated to an exhibition of how the grave was revealed during the archaeological excavation along with the tools of the archaeologist’s trade on view.

These exciting displays bring the early medieval dead to life for visitors, providing them with a focus to speculate about the personalities and identities of the dead and the societies in which they lived and died. Moreover, these exhibits attract the audience into the early medieval world of death and the rituals and superstitions that surrounded the transformation and commemoration of the dead. In many ways, the display may be similar to that created in the composition of the grave in the early Middle Ages, affording a tableau which portrays the deceased in an idealised form, and containing many messages to be ‘read’ by its audience.⁵⁴ Yet it remains the case that these displays do not capture the dynamics of the funerary process. They embody the challenge of conveying the actions of early medieval mourners. It is clearly difficult to engage with death today as it may have been experienced by early medieval people. Instead, one is offered a static, seemingly timeless corpse that bears a closer resemblance to medieval effigy tombs than it may do to the multiple staged early medieval funeral. Museums face this challenge, and are answering it in increasingly innovative ways of engaging with the multi-sensory interaction of the living with the dead in past mortuary rituals through illustrations, reconstructions and performances.

It might be worth considering how the representation of early medieval graves forms one facet of the contemporary art of death or art ‘against death’. Certainly there are close resemblances between the reconstructed graves from Lechlade and Sutton Hoo with other famous instances of deliberately preserved human remains found across the world from the mummies of Egypt to those of South America.⁵⁵ In terms of popular perception, the dead Saxons are being immortalised in a comparable way to these more geographically far-flung vestiges of ancient funerary obsequies. In another sense, one cannot help but notice resemblances with the embalmers art of the modern undertaker, allowing the dead to be displayed to mourners in the open-casket funeral.⁵⁶ Equally, one might compare the display of human remains in museums to more extreme uses of the cadaver in art, as with the recent ‘Body World’ exhibitions, in which Western perceptions and understandings of death, the dead and the body are challenged.⁵⁷ In this way, it might be possible to regard the display of the dead as an art-form that prompts engagement with mortality. Therefore, while these displays bring home the positive educational role of museums in facilitating engagement with the past through mortuary remains, simultaneously illustrations and reconstructions of graves may hold a value for today’s visitor by depicting death. In a society that rarely sees death in reality since the dead are hidden within hospitals and dealt with by undertakers, can archaeology provide one of the few arenas for intellectual and popular engagements with mortality?⁵⁸

Ethical Debates

The ethics of mortuary archaeology have been dominated by the reburial debate. For the UK, this has impacted on the repatriation and reburial of human and cultural remains held by museums from other parts of the world, notably the Americas and Australasia.⁵⁹ Only on occasion has the debate affected the excavation of British burial sites prior to the later and post-medieval periods where objections to excavation are more commonplace. The study of medieval Jewish burials from Jewbury, York are often cited as an example of archaeologists facing protests from a religious minority.⁶⁰ It might be thought at first-glance that there are simply no indigenous groups to object against archaeologists digging up and curating the remains of the early medieval dead, and therefore in turn, that ethical considerations and the pressure for re-burial are irrelevant. In fact, neither is the case; there are non-archaeological groups interested in the treatment of human remains from the early Middle Ages, and, in any case, an absence of protest does not mean that ethics are not an issue.⁶¹

There are certainly many strong strands of argument supporting the excavation, retention, and even the display, of early medieval mortuary remains. Through Meet the Ancestors and other media, the early medieval dead have become an integral part of British academic and popular culture.⁶² Given the research value of this material, together with the fact that personal identities cannot be known and there is no issue of surviving personal memories of these individuals, it may be argued that there is no debate to be had. Yet, does the antiquity of the material and the lack of a strong indigenous protest movement make research into early medieval mortuary practices free of ethical concerns?

It is this author’s contention that there are a range of potential ‘stakeholders’ in the treatment of early medieval graves of which archaeologists are but one.⁶³ The most obvious ethical challenges facing archaeologists derive from negotiation with various modern religious groups. Recent guidelines have been agreed upon concerning the best practice for dealing with human remains from Christian burial grounds that exerts a modest degree of pressure for the re-burial of early medieval burial populations. While the guidelines give archaeologists latitude in the treatment of early medieval graves uncovered at sites of religious worship, this does not rule out the likelihood that instances will inevitably occur where Christian communities may express strong concerns and objections to archaeological excavations.⁶⁴ Conversely, there seems to be a small but growing voice among neo-pagans concerning the archaeological treatment of early medieval graves, some of whom claim spiritual and ancestral links to an Anglo-Saxon or Viking heritage.⁶⁵ Finally, local communities and landowners, aside from any clear religious or political motivations, might voice strong opinions concerning the excavation, curation and display of early medieval remains. This seems to have taken place in Wessex Archaeology’s recent investigations of an early medieval burial in Wiltshire leading to the re-interment of the human remains close to the site of discovery.⁶⁶

These voices are not always ones of objection; they can often be strongly on the side of archaeologists. This was the case with the road-widening scheme that threatened the site of the wealthy early seventh-century chamber grave excavated by the Museum of London Archaeological Service in 2004. The early medieval grave’s discovery can be linked to the emergence of a sense of pride and identity as well as the environmental concerns of initial road protests.⁶⁷

The archaeological evidence shows us clearly that early medieval people cared for and respected their dead. If archaeologists have any interest in graves as more than a store of human remains that can be subjected for scientific analysis, then there is a need to both respect and appreciate these archaeological contexts as the intentional outcomes of past mortuary rituals and invested with the personalities and emotions of the survivors (see above). For instance, early medieval attitudes can be discerned in the fear or respect for disturbing the dead evident in the low frequency of intercutting and disturbed graves at many sites. Yet equally we have many cases where for ritual or practical reasons, graves were re-opened, disturbed and human remains could be curated, suggesting that the early medieval dead could have long and significant material ‘afterlives’.⁶⁸ Equally, the complexity and heterogeneity of early medieval mortuary practices shows us no single response towards the commemoration and veneration of ‘ancestors’. We can identify so many early medieval death-ways, in terms of the deployment of artefacts, structures, technologies, spaces, monuments and the landscape, found in both non-Christian and early Christian communities. It is equally problematic to distinguish and ascribe ‘pagan’ and ‘Christian’ labels to the diverse and contingent set of shifting responses to death and disposal that we find in the early medieval archaeological record.⁶⁹

Therefore if we are imposing modern ethics onto the archaeological treatment of early medieval human remains and cultural objects, we cannot entertain the conceit that this has anything to do with the beliefs of early medieval people; it is based on our societies’ values and perceptions of the dead. Consequently, archaeologists must challenge the assumptions behind our modern values, especially when they differentiate the treatment of the early medieval dead in terms of perceived religious beliefs and status. This is certainly what has happened, perhaps unwittingly, with the early medieval Christian dead as a consequence of the new guidelines created by English Heritage and the Church of England. Those early medieval graves uncovered at a site of modern worship are being given different ethical treatment to the vast majority of both the early medieval non-Christian and Christian dead who were probably not buried in churchyards before the tenth and eleventh centuries AD and for whom no guidelines have been agreed upon.⁷⁰ The same debate could be developed along lines of the social identities constructed through early medieval burials. For instance, should the differential treatment afforded to the dead in the past reflect the respect we afford them in the present, or should our judgements provide differential treatment? Certainly we can see both the biases of early medieval and modern people influencing the different responses to the preferential treatment of the Prittlewell chamber grave over other early medieval burials. Would similar attention have been lavished on a find-less cist-burial from Cornwall or Fife, and would the contorted skeleton of an early medieval execution victim found in the ditch of a Norfolk Early Bronze Age barrow attract the same level of respect?⁷¹ Therefore while ethical considerations cannot be dismissed, archaeologists need to rigorously challenge the assumptions and biases that can easily pervade such debates and afford differential treatment to early medieval bodies and grave goods.

In this light it is clear that early medieval archaeologists need to address the ethical issue head-on, developing robust and theorised ethical arguments in support of their activities in order to anticipate the possibility that their activities will meet with objections on ethical grounds in certain circumstances.⁷² This is particularly important since it might be argued that the early Middle Ages sit on a crucial fault line between ancient and modern perceptions of death and disposal. Ignoring the issue will render early medieval archaeologists enfeebled when it arises, especially if this occurs in the media spotlight. Certainly a respect for, and liaison with, the interests of local communities and stakeholders in ancient remains can serve to avoid conflict and enhance the understanding of archaeological research to the wider public, and perhaps render early medieval discoveries an important resource for the promotion of local histories and identities. But there remain problems with accepting a single ethical stance towards early medieval human remains. Certainly re-burial should not be accepted as a ‘token’ gesture towards political correctness. For this reason, the debate over the ethical treatment of early medieval graves, is likely to become of paramount importance for the future of archaeological research. Without a consideration of these issues, archaeologists working in periods deemed ‘safe’ from the reburial issue might find themselves forced to accept repatriation and reburial without a fight because of agendas and guidelines imposed upon them by others, or equally may fail in exciting opportunities of including diverse communities and groups in the exploration of this fascinating form of archaeological evidence.

Conclusion

It is hoped that this introduction not only provides a background to current scholarly debate, but also encourages readers and researchers to regard the study of early medieval burial as an exciting and developing field of enquiry in which the more questions we ask open up new avenues of research. Rather than restricting ourselves to age-old questions, the challenge of future research is to both look at old questions in new ways, but also to address new questions in new ways. Which themes addressed here receive consideration and which do not, will be as interesting to chart over the coming decades.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Heinrich Härke, Martin Rundkvist, Sarah Semple, Faye Simpson and Elizabeth Williams for commenting on earlier drafts of this introduction.

Notes

1 For a recent review, see Lucy 2000; Lucy and Reynolds 2002.

2 For popular engagements with the archaeological discovery of the dead, see Bahn 1996; 2003. For an example of this applied to the early Middle Ages, see Richards 1999.

3 E.g. Miles 2005; Pryor 2004.

4 Battiscombe 1956; Webster 1992. On the collecting of early medieval artefacts, see Effros 2003a.

5 For example, the immortalised story of the excavation of mound 1 at Sutton Hoo, see Carver 1998.

6 E.g. see Effros 2003b; Halsall 2003.

7 Browne 1658.

8 Douglas 1793.

9 E.g. Smith 1856; Wylie 1852.

10 E.g. Carver 1998; Leeds and Harden 1936.

11 Meaney and Hawkes 1970.

12 E.g. Boddington 1996; Rodwell and Rodwell 1983.

13 Alcock 1992.

14 Lucy 2002; Marsden 1999.

15 Morse 1999.

16 Lethbridge 1931.

17 Bruce-Mitford 1975.

18 E.g. compare the recording of graves in the recent unfurnished early medieval cemeteries at Llandough with those from furnished early medieval cemeteries such as at Sewerby: Hirst 1985.

19 Haughton and Powlesland 1999; Filmer-Sankey and Pestell 2001.

20 Hines et al. 1999.

21 Mays 1998; McKinley 1994.

22 Lucy 2000.

23 Budd et al. 2004; Montgomery et al. 2005.

24 Lucy 2002.

25 Bonney 1966.

26 E.g. Arnold 1980.

27 Stoodley 1999.

28 Lucy 1998; Pader 1982; Richards 1987.

29 Carver 2000; Halsall 2003.

30 O’Brien 1999.

31 Williams 2005.

32 Andrén 1993.

33 Eckardt and Williams 2003.

34 Oestigaard 2000.

35 Lucy 1998.

36 Williams 2004.

37 Williams 2006.

38 Fowler 2004.

39 Tarlow 1999; Williams 2007.

40 Hills 2003.

41 Stoodley 1999.

42 Rippon 2000.

43 Thompson 2004.

44 Semple 1998; 2004.

45 For a recent discussion of the use of ethnographic analogy for understanding mortuary and ritual practices in past societies, see for example Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina 1998.

46 E.g. for cremation experimentations, see McKinley 1997.

47 Carver 2005.

48 Lucy 2002.

49 Effros 2003.

50 For example, see the range of reconstructions involving facial reconstructions, portrayals of funerary scenes and the visual representations of graves discussed by Redknap 2002, 38–44. For the popular representation of early Anglo-Saxon death, see for example: Poulton 1990.

51 E.g. West 2000, 9–21.

52 Plunkett 2002. Lucy and Herring’s assessment of the portrayal of the early Anglo-Saxons in museum displays focused, as do many museums and open-air centres, on the reconstruction of ‘life and material culture’. Yet they do note the potential provided by the reconstruction of the ‘Glen Parva lady’ at Leicester in stimulating interest in the difference in attitudes to death between the past and present as well as the process of archaeological interpretation: Lucy and Herring 1999, 84.

53 Boyle et al. 1998.

54 Carver 2000; Lucy and Herring 1999, 87.

55 Bahn 1996; Bahn 2003; Chamberlain and Parker Pearson 2001.

56 Chamberlain and Parker Pearson 2001, 169–76.

57 Chamberlain and Parker Pearson 2001, 8; Hallam, Hockey and Howarth 1999, 34–42; von Hagaens and Whalley 2001.

58 Jupp and Walter 1999.

59 Fforde, Hubert and Turnbull 2002; Fforde 2004.

60 Lilley, et al. 1994.

61 Carroll 2005.

62 Payne 2004; Richards 1999.

63 Fforde 2004.

64 English Heritage/Church of England 2005.

65 Brothwell 2004, 416; Wallis 2001.

66 Carroll 2005; McKinley 2003.

67 Pitts 2006.

68 Härke 2000.

69 Here we might emphasise the critique of the universal use of the term ‘ancestors’ in both the re-burial debate and in archaeological interpretations of mortuary ritual: see for example Whitley 2002.

70 Hadley 2002.

71 Hirst 2004; MOLAS 2004; Pitts 2006.

72 Brothwell 2004.

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Ethnicity, ‘Race’ and Migration in Mortuary Archaeology: an Attempt at a Short Answer

Heinrich Härke

This is a belated answer to a question from the audience in the last few minutes of the concluding discussion of the Exeter conference. The essence of the question was: ‘What is the current state of thinking on the inference of ethnicity and race from archaeological evidence? How can we play the numbers game concerning the relationship between immigrants and natives in the Migration Period?’ The question was not directed at anybody in particular, but a reference to my interest in this matter made clear that it was indirectly meant for me. However, it was such a big question on a complex issue that I was unwilling to give an off-the-cuff answer. Having had some time to consider it, I am willing to give it a try now given the continued importance of the question for the study of early medieval mortuary practices. But in relation to the complexity of the question, it will have to be a reasonably short answer –books can be, and have been, written on this question.¹ Inevitably, it will also reflect my own current thinking on this subject more than that of the discipline as a whole, not least because I retained an interest in the archaeological identification of ethnicity and migration throughout the time when these topics were considered to be deeply unfashionable or even objectionable in some quarters of British archaeology. The emphasis will be more on archaeology than physical anthropology in which I cannot claim specialist expertise; mine is therefore a consumer’s perspective on skeletal data.

First of all, we need some clarification of the terminology in order to avoid (or remove) confusion. The concept of ‘race’ was originally meant as a tool of biological classification, and if it is used at all (see below), it should be limited to this. Ethnicity, by contrast, is a cultural concept, describing perceptions and expressions of group identity as seen by observers or the respective people themselves. Students of the Early Middle Ages will also frequently encounter the term ‘tribe’: strictly speaking, ‘tribes’ are units within a segmentary type of social organisation, and they should therefore be conceptually distinct from ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ groups. In addition, names of language groups (Celts, Germani, Slavs, Balts, Turks etc.) are often used in early medieval archaeology as if they reflect biological or cultural group affiliations or even socio-political units –which they do not, neither in principle nor, mostly, in practice.

Unfortunately, recent political terminology has muddied the waters, with ‘ethnicity’ becoming the politically acceptable term for what used to be called ‘race’, possibly because the latter term has become tainted with the connotation of racism (as ethnicity has now become tainted by the association with ethnic violence and ethnic cleansing). It does not help that some scholarly texts, particularly history textbooks, still use ‘race’ to describe culturally or historically defined groups of people.² In a more general, but equally wrong sense, ‘race’ is occasionally used for the entire human species (the ‘human race’).

‘Race’ in Archaeology and Physical Anthropology

Let us start with ‘race’ because the answer to the original question is reasonably straightforward: You cannot infer race from archaeological evidence because it is a biological concept, and as such it cannot be inferred from cultural remains. For this, you would need biological evidence, i.e. human bones, blood groups, DNA etc. The analysis of skeletal traits, in particular skull shapes (craniology) which were seen as racially diagnostic, underpinned much of the race anthropology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There was also a widespread assumption that, once the traits of a particular ‘race’ had been established, not only would it be possible to distinguish it from other ‘races’, but also the ‘racial’ origins of individuals could be established using their skeletal measurements and ratios.

However, biologists have become very dissatisfied with the concept of race, mainly for two reasons. The first is the vagueness of the concept itself: race was intended to be the highest category of classification below the level of species; but because at this level interbreeding is, by definition, possible, the resulting races were found to have fuzzy boundaries and marked overlaps.³ The second reason (which often appears to be the more important one in modern attitudes) was the blatant misuse of the concept of race in late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship and politics.⁴ Today, the concept has been all but abandoned in physical anthropology.⁵

The Archaeological Inference of Ethnic Identity

Ethnicity is a different matter. Because it is a cultural phenomenon, it should, in principle, be possible to infer it from cultural evidence, including archaeological remains. In early medieval archaeology, such inferences have routinely been made using grave-goods, in particular female dress items, to identify ‘tribes’ (usually meaning ethnic groups) named in the written sources of the period, to follow their migrations, and to identify the ‘tribal’ affiliations of individuals.

However, this concept has also undergone extensive re-assessment. Historians of the Early Middle Ages have re-thought ethnic identity since the 1960s.⁶ As a result, early medieval ethnic identity is now commonly seen as a ‘situational construct’:⁷ it is considered to be not ‘in the blood’, but ‘in the head’, and therefore flexible and changeable. The archaeological re-assessment,